Understanding Public Folders

Last but not least, Public folders in Exchange 2003 have been updated to include minor enhancements to referrals and replication and an enhanced user interface for managing folders.

Public folders are administered through the Exchange System Manager in the Folders node. If you click on a particular Public folder, you will see that five property pages are now associated with folders, including these:

• Details Displays subfolders that are within the folder you are viewing.

• Content Enables you to view the content that is contained within a public folder.

• Find Enables you to find folders that are within the Public folder hierarchy.

• Status Displays the status of a particular folder, including the size, number of items, last update, and so on.

• Replication Displays the replication status, including the last received time and average transport time.

Of all these property pages, the addition of the Content tab is probably the biggest improvement. The Content tab allows you to view the posts, documents, messages, and so on that are contained within a particular folder. This functionality was not difficult to add to the System Manager because it has the same interface that is used for viewing Public folders on the Web.

For those of you who have ever moved a folder and lost it (or just couldn't find it again), the search facility should save you many hours of looking through a complex hierarchy to find the folder you want.

REFERRAL CHANGES

The changes to referrals mean that you can now prioritize the servers used for referrals by using the cost method.

Finally, Exchange administrators should be pleased with the new manual replication options for Public folders that enable you to kick off replication at a time that is convenient to you. To manually start replication, right-click on the top-level folder and select Send Hierarchy to send the folder structure. Alternatively, you can right-click on any folder and select Send Content to replicate the contents of a folder.